Nightmare's End

(See Cover)

It was a pleasant Italian morning, with pale sunlight shimmering through a thin mist. Poppies bloomed in the wheat, crickets chirped in the weeds and skylarks sang overhead.

Lieut. Francis Xavier Buckley, a carrot-thatched engineer from Philadelphia, was tooling his jeep northward from Terracina along the coastal road, accompanied by a private. When they came to a wrecked bridge near Borgo Grappa, they got out and started to walk, escorted by a flock of politely curious Italians on bicycles. At 7:31 Buckley met a force moving south from the Anzio beachhead -- Captain Benjamin Harrison Souza of Honolulu and his platoon of engineers. The captain and lieutenant stared at each other.

"Where in hell do you think you're going?" Captain Souza growled.

"I'm trying to make contact with the Anzio forces," said Buckley.

"Boy," said Souza, "you've made it." Thus the Anzio beachhead passed into history, after four months of toil, tribulation and terror. The beachhead front and the Cassino front at last were one, and this was high drama for home-front folks leaping at headlines. The Allied offensive in Italy formed the southern prong of the promised triple attack on Hitler's heartland. With things going so well in the south, D-day in the west and the pounce of the Russian giant could not be far behind.

Concentrated Hell. Bloody was the struggle for Cisterna, where General von Mackensen, commanding the German Fourteenth Army, had turned the railway embankment into a fortification. There some U.S. Rangers, members of two battalions wiped out in the frustrated attack of Jan. 30, were still rotting on the ground.

Last week the Americans had 1,000 field pieces pouring concentrated hell on Cisterna. Even so they had to repulse seven German tank thrusts before they moved in through a jungle of booby traps and mines and a mass of shattered and scorched tanks, half-tracks, trucks and self-propelled guns.

Bloody also was the fight for Artena, which was desperately defended by rear guard German machine gunners firing from houses, woods and ditches. But Artena fell.

Its fall severed the Nazis' lateral communication between Valmontone and Velletri, their two main strongholds in front of the Alban Hills. From Artena, the Fifth Army's big guns shelled Valmontone and adjacent stretches of Via Casilina. So the main escape route to Rome of General von Flietinghoff's Tenth Army remnants, dropping back from Cassino, became a road of dire peril.

Kesselring's Plight. Blocking of Via Casilina would mean that the Germans could retire only on the road north from Arce through Sora, and on the secondary road north from Frosinone. But both routes had a big drawback: they did not lead straight to Rome.

In sore straits, Field Marshal Albert Kesselring brought down from the north the once-famed Hermann Goring Division, which had been wiped out in Tunisia and since reconstituted. Another reinforcement was an infantry division which had been fighting Marshal Tito's Yugoslav Partisans at Istria. Prisoners from one regiment of reinforcements told Allied intelligence officers that half their motor transport and personnel had been destroyed on the way to the front by Allied air action, and that the remainder were decimated, as soon as they took up their line positions, by Allied tank attacks.

Everybody Fights. General Sir Harold Alexander, the Allied commander in Italy, had every reason to be proud of his polyglot armies. The doughty Poles took Monte Cairo, a rock mass more than a mile high, and Piedimonte; Amaseno and Castro dei Volsci fell to the French and their black colonials; United Kingdom troops entered Aquino and swart fighters from India occupied Roccasecca. The Canadians, some of whom nonchalantly swam the Liri River, took Ceprano.

Jubilation. German captives were numbered at more than 15,000 in three weeks, an impressive proof of the swiftness of Allied attack, the disruption of German outfits. In Washington, Secretary Stimson jubilated over the performance of the new divisions of the U.S. II Corps who had never before been in battle. He attributed their "tireless energy" and "freshness and vigor" to the fact that casualties were immediately replaced by fresh troops to maintain the corps at full strength. Later it was announced that among the reinforcements were the U.S. 85th and 88th Divisions--not only battlegreen but entirely composed of draft levies. They distinguished themselves at Terracina.

At his headquarters, General Alexander paid his own tribute to the Anglo-U.S. troops of the Fifth Army: "The bridgehead force has played a most important role in the strategy of the Italian campaign. The enemy, unable to ignore this threat or to deal with it with troops he had available in southern Italy, was forced to send reinforcements from elsewhere which he could ill spare. These troops have been pinned down by our forces for four months. . . .

"The enemy has been forced to fight on an extended front . . . continually engaged . . . while our regroupment was in progress. . . . Because of the position of the Allied beachhead force, the enemy couldn't know where our next blow would fall. . . . [Allied troops] have been fully conscious of the role they have played."

So the much-discussed beachhead operation emerged from the murky half-light of second-guessing which has befogged it for months. No doubt, it had been a nightmare. Thousands of soldiers were jammed into an area of 90 square miles, nearly every foot of which lay open to enemy bombs and shells. With surprising agility, Kesselring had moved up five divisions to contain the landing forces. The weather was bad. Most of the time the ground was too wet for tanks to maneuver efficiently. Begun after Alexander had taken over from General Eisenhower, it had become one of the most rugged Anglo-U.S. operations of the war.

The Loaded Pistol. Unable to enlarge his holding, but sure that it was the key to a winning battle, Alexander calmly hung on to it until he was ready to use it, and turned to other alternatives. He got air forces to beat Cassino off the map, but the infantry moved in sluggishly and the great bombing effort was wasted. He set out to hamstring the Germans' main supply lines --the railways--and his air commanders did that job so well (TIME, May 22) that, on the eve of the Allied attack, the Germans had to depend almost entirely on truck convoys traveling by night.

Meanwhile Alexander crammed the beachhead to the bursting point with men and supplies, until it became a loaded pistol jabbed into the Nazi flank. He also beefed up the Cassino-Tyrrhenian Sea line by westward movements from the Cassino-Adriatic front. When he was ready to strike at Anzio, Allied naval craft, including battleships, stood off the coast and battered the enemy positions.

At Terracina last fortnight the German mortar fire was so heavy that one shell-shocked U.S. soldier lay screaming in a ditch, stuffing his ears with leaves and paper. But last week German artillery fire was weak almost everywhere, as though they had pulled back their remaining guns in an effort to save them, or were running out of ammunition, or both.

The Germans were definitely hungry, as many prisoners testified. Alexander's air superiority was so enormous that on one day, when Allied flyers flew 2,500 sorties, only one German plane was sighted. A formation of Warhawks caught an enemy truck convoy running bumper to bumper near Artena, shot up 100 vehicles. The total of enemy trucks put out of action since the attack began was estimated at nearly 4.000.

The Boss. The man who conceived the pattern of victory in Italy had the benefit of advice from his ground, air and naval commanders--especially Generals Mark Clark of the Fifth Army and Sir Oliver Leese of the Eighth. He could also unload a great batch of detail work on his brilliant staff and its trim new chief, Lieut. General Allan F. ("John") Harding, who was now recovered from severe wounds received in Africa while commanding Britain's crack 7th Armored Division.

But in the last analysis it was Alexander's show. He was the boss. Small, quiet-voiced General Alexander took his successes with philosophical calm, for he is a man intimately acquainted with disaster as well as triumph.

Schoolbooks of the future can hardly omit the story of Alexander at Dunkirk, waiting for the ships to come and thoughtfully building sand castles while German bullets spattered around him. He had taken command of the B.E.F. when it was already broken and scrambling for the sea, and he was the last man in his command to leave.

One dark night he moved along the shore in a MT boat, shouting: "Are there any British soldiers still ashore, any French soldiers? Speak up." He got no answer--the great evacuation had been completed. Alexander went back to England, to take command in the southern parts where Hitler was expected to invade.

Ten Runs Behind. In 1942 Alexander was flown to Burma to take command there when the situation was already hopeless. He landed in Rangoon, which was protected only by two ill-trained divisions north of the city. He personally had to fight his way up the Irrawaddy through nests of Japs.

He did it without lifting an eyebrow, driving a jeep with one hand, clutching a pistol with the other, while his aide blasted the jungle thickets with a machine gun. Alexander was not blamed for Dunkirk or Burma. In both theaters, he was in the position of a relief pitcher who enters a baseball game with his team ten runs behind.

In Africa, Alexander replaced Auchinleck as commander of the British Middle East Forces when Rommel was battering at the gates of Alexandria. He was at a relief job again. Cool as a cucumber in a gin sling and twice as impersonal, he planned and mounted the great attack which General Sir Bernard Law Montgomery brilliantly executed--and Rommel was rolled all the way back to Tripolitania.

At the peak of this victory, Alexander was told to give up his command to become General Eisenhower's deputy. He complied without a murmur, produced for his chief a battle plan that trapped 150,000 Germans in Tunisia. After the conquest of Sicily, in which he earned a large share of credit, he succeeded Eisenhower in Italy with the reputation in many quarters of being the ablest commander in Britain's service. Given a set of real chances, the officer long recognized as the most aggressive in the British Army had finally become a figure on the victory pages of history.

Wild Boys. Third son of the fourth Earl of Caledon, Harold Rupert Leofric George Alexander was born 52 years ago in County Tyrone, Northern Ireland.* The family, Catholics in a predominantly Protestant region, lived in a rambling old stone house surrounded by a forest and park where fallow deer ran wild. Harold's father died when he was a baby, and he and his four brothers ran wild, too, returning to the house mostly for sleep.

Harold went to Harrow and Sandhurst (Britain's West Point), became a dashing young blade, an indifferent student, a topflight track athlete. In 1914, he won the Irish mile (6,721 ft.) in 4 min. 33 sec. He chose to start his military career in the Irish Guards rather than the Coldstream Guards which his grandfather had commanded. In World War I he went over the top 30 times, was wounded twice, became a lieutenant colonel and a battalion commander at 26.

After the armistice Alexander commanded a force of Letts and Germans which fought the Russian Reds in the Baltic. Later he visited Istanbul (where he introduced the Irish jig to the astonished Turks), moved on to India, where he got in some skirmishing on the northwest frontier. He also found time to marry beauteous Lady Margaret Diana Bingham; they have three children. A classic specimen of the English professional officer type, Alexander is self-contained, quiet, outwardly confident when the world shakes. He speaks German, French, Italian, Russian, Urdu, seems to be at home anywhere. Last fortnight, in the thick of the Italian fighting, his U.S. aide, Captain John Grimsby, was startled to hear a guttural German voice barking in the General's room. It was Alexander taking his German lesson from a phonograph.

No Helmet. Alexander is indifferent to heat, cold, rain, dust, danger and food. This convenient oblivion enables him to concentrate on tactics and strategy and a quiet craze for physical fitness in his troops. No matter how eccentric his dress, he usually looks neat as a pin and sharp as a tack.

Last week he turned up at the fighting fronts in a light grey flannel bush coat, khaki drill breeches, polo boots, Sam Browne belt, and an ancient stern-visored guardsman's cap, which he has clung to for years: it has been rebuilt three times. Neither at Dunkirk nor anywhere since then has he bothered to wear a steel helmet.

A man of quiet power, General Alexander never raises his voice to give an order. He neither seeks nor avoids publicity, is completely undisturbed by the fact that more colorful generals are better known to the Allied public. He dislikes military fanfare. On a visit. to General Leese's Eighth Army headquarters last week he was escorted by a swarm of motorcycles with sirens screaming. Before starting back to his headquarters he thanked and dismissed them. "Awfully bad manners," he said, "to have those chaps chasing the troops off the roads."

Alexander has not lost much sleep during the current fighting. He studies and confers in the morning, visits the battle zones in the afternoon, dines at eight, goes to bed at ten unless his dinner guests are very special.

What Next? The Germans would have liked to know what General Alexander was going to do next. Whatever it was, Field Marshal Kesselring's armies seemed in poor position to stop him. Kesselring had 18 or 19 front-line divisions in Italy, many of which were badly mauled last week. He had practically no reserves which were not already committed. His troops still fought and fought bitterly: they were a long way from demorilization.

But it was still a question how many of his divisions would escape encirclement in the long range. Alexander had laid out his campaign as a design for destruction. Kesselring had to thwart that design and still try to guess his foe's tactical aim.

Would Alexander try to by-pass and encircle Rome, or attack it directly? What was to prevent him from staging another beachhead operation north of the city? Would he develop another flanking movement far to the east, at Pescara on the Adriatic?

Fight or Flee? The Germans could not seem to make up their minds whether they would defend Rome or not. A Berlin radio announcement that Rome would positively be defended was contradicted by Adolf Hitler's own newspaper. The Volkischer Beobachter declared--perhaps to prepare the home front for more bad news --that the retreat would continue to North Italy. The Vichy radio bleated: "The capture of Rome would bring no new element in the conduct of the war except the prestige.. . . The German High Command has stated on many previous occasions that it would accept battle only north of Rome at a place chosen by it. . . .' Napoleon Bonaparte, who knew the weaknesses of divided command as well as anyone in history, once said: Give me allies to fight against. Though Teuton militarists admire Napoleon very much, there was no comfort in his dictum for the Germans who faced Alexander. In Italy, Alexander was certainly commanding allies, but in Egypt he had successfully managed an even more polyglot and rainbow-hued aggregation. He had learned how to get air, naval and ground commanders to function smoothly together. His was no divided command. He was the boss.

-Other Irishmen among Britain's top commanders: Field Marshal Sir John G. Dill, General Sir Bernard L. Montgomery, General Sir Claude J. E. Auchinleck, Field Marshal Sir Alan F. Brooke.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.